Artemis 1, which includes Orion, a six-person deep-space exploration capsule atop a 98-meter (322-foot), 2,600-ton (2,875-ton) long Space Launch System (SLS), is scheduled for its maiden take off at 8.33am 1.33 p.m. UK time) from the same Cape Canaveral launch complex that carried out the Apollo lunar missions half a century ago. In addition to the spectacular fire display that is expected to attract hundreds of thousands of spectators to Florida’s Space Coast, Nasa is keen to showcase the progress it has made in its efforts to return astronauts to the Moon. “This day has been a long time coming,” NASA Associate Administrator Robert Campana said after mission managers completed a flight readiness review this week. “We’re one step away from launching, which is great.” Monday’s planned test flight, which has a two-hour launch window and will take 42 days on a 1.3-mile odyssey to 40,000 miles beyond the far side of the moon and back, includes two close-by flights 62 miles above the surface of the Moon. Orion has no crew, except for mannequins that will allow Nasa to assess next-generation spacesuits and radiation levels, and a Snoopy soft toy that will float around the capsule as an indicator of zero gravity. But a successful mission would push the agency closer to its goal of sending two astronauts, including the first woman, to land on the Moon’s south pole by the end of 2025, while up to two more remain in lunar orbit in a command module . An interim second test flight, Artemis II, is planned for May 2024, taking a crew of four to the Moon and back, though not landing, and sending humans beyond low Earth orbit for the first time since Apollo 17 in December 1972. That mission nearly 50 years ago also carried the last two of only 12 people, all men, to ever set foot on the moon, Harrison Schmidt and Eugene Cernan. “This is now the generation of Artemis. We were in the generation of Apollo. This is a new generation. This is a new type of astronaut,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator and former space shuttle astronaut, said at a news conference earlier this month. Noting the symbolism in the program’s name – in Greek mythology, Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo – he added: “To all of us who gaze at the moon, dreaming of the day when humanity returns to the lunar surface… children, here we are.” Despite being a new rocket, the SLS draws heavily from existing technology. The 8.8 million pounds of core thrust, 15 percent more power than Apollo-era Saturn V rockets, comes from four RS-25 engines recycled from the space shuttle program that ended in 2011. Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, speaks to reporters at Cape Canaveral. Photo: John Raoux/AP Similarly, the two five-stage solid rocket boosters “build on three decades of knowledge and experience gained with the Space Shuttle booster and are enhanced with the latest technology,” Nasa said. After reaching Earth’s lowest orbit about eight minutes into flyby, an interlunar thrust will increase Orion’s speed from 17,500 mph to 22,600 mph to escape Earth’s gravitational pull and bring the craft to a precise point close enough to to be captured by the moon. gravity. Nelson said the flight will allow mission managers to thoroughly test the capabilities of the rocket and capsule to ensure their safety for human spaceflight. “We will highlight it and test it. We’re going to make it do things we’d never do with a crew to try and make it as safe as possible,” he said. Orion will remain in space longer than any human spacecraft in history without tethering to a space station, and its return home, in a dive into the Pacific Ocean in mid-October, will be faster and warmer than any vehicle before it. Traveling at up to 25,000 mph, the capsule will defy temperatures of about 2,800 C (5,000 F) as it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere and slows to about 300 mph. Three parachutes will then deploy to further slow Orion to less than 20 mph for launch off San Diego, California. The development of Nasa’s first lunar rover in two generations has had a rocky ride. The SLS heavy-lift rocket ran into problems during testing last year, while it was already three years behind schedule and nearly $3bn (£2.5bn) over budget. The $4.1 billion cost per launch has also come under scrutiny, with Paul Martin, Nasa’s inspector general, telling Congress in March that the figure was “unsustainable.” According to the latest estimates, Nasa will have spent $93 billion on the program by 2025, with large sums going to private contractors in the US, including Lockheed Martin, which developed Orion, and Boeing, which built the SLS base stage. “NASA has already taken steps, at least tentatively, to buy a production run of SLS, which will help keep costs down if you buy many at a time instead of one each,” said John Logsdon, founder of the Space Policy Institute in George Washington University. Logsdon also notes the concern of analysts such as the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) that the Artemis program, in part because of NASA’s reliance on outside partners, lacks the defined leadership structure and control of the almost entirely in-house Apollo and space . transportation projects. “A piecemeal, uncoordinated approach is doomed to failure,” the group told the House Science, Space and Technology Committee in March. The criticism is valid, Logsdon said. “There is general agreement that the management structure that Nasa has developed for Artemis needs fixing and there needs to be some central structure to manage all the elements of a very complex undertaking. “[But] a program is just a program. And two years between this mission and the next one doesn’t seem too aggressive to me. “This is, after all, a test mission. Many things can go wrong, some things are likely to go wrong. The question is whether these are catastrophic failures or failures that can be addressed and fixed, and we won’t know until we fly the mission. NASA recognizes that the world is watching.”
